NJIT Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences Bruce Bukiet has released his annual Major League Baseball projections and he doesn't say see good things for the Pittsburgh Pirates - the official baseball team of Science 2.0 - but at least his favorite team, the Mets, are going to stink too.

Well, in the world of Bayes projections anyway. They still have to play the games.

Bukiet's model, published in Operations Research, can be used to project the number of games a team should be expected to win, the optimal batting order for a set of 9 batters, and how trading players will likely influence a team's number of wins.

For the 2014 season, Bukiet's model pegs Boston, Detroit, and Oakland as American League Division winners, with Anaheim and Seattle narrowly edging Tampa Bay and the New York Yankees in the AL Wildcard chase. In the National League, the numbers say St. Louis, Washington, and Los Angeles will take the top spots in their respective divisions. San Francisco and Atlanta are predicted to fill the Wildcard slots.

"There are some unknowns that the model can't incorporate in projecting team win totals before the season, such as rookie performance and trades that have not yet occurred, but, sadly for my Mets, the forcasts have been very accurate," Bukiet noted - and he predicts 68 wins and a last-place finish for the Metropolitans this year so perhaps they should get an early start on that July salary dump. Bukiet's preseason expectations for the Mets have been within 3 games of the win total attained by the team in 9 of the last 10 seasons.

A listing of Bukiet's 2014 expected win totals for each MLB team can be found below, and his daily projections are posted at http://www.egrandslam.com.